No, this God is a different God; a god who sets himself above the formal, logical, merciless correctness of the law and proclaims a "better" righteousness and may even justify the transgressor of the law; a God for whom the commandments exist for the sake of the human person, and not the human person for the sake of the commandments; a God who does not overthrow the existing legal order and the whole social system, but who tempers it for humanity's sake, and a God who consequently wants to have the barriers of categorization between good people and bad, friends and foes, neighbors and strangers, workers and unemployed, removed How? By humanity, self-denial, love, forgiveness without end, service regardless of reward, sacrifice without compensation. In this way God puts himself on the side of the disadvantaged, the under privileged, the oppressed, the weak, the poor and the sick, the even - unlike the self-righteous - on the side of the irreligious, the immoral, and the godless. God is kind, wonderfully kind to human beings.
It was for this God and his wonderful kindness that Jesus pleaded. For him he spoke, fought, suffered, and was executed. And at this point, of course, the question always arises did it not all end in his death? The cautious answer can at first be one that even the non-Christian can accept. It is a fact of history that Jesus' death was not the end of everything but only the beginning; that his first community, in a truly reckless fashion, proclaimed him - the heretical teacher, false prophet, seducer of the people, blasphemer, allegedly condemned by God - to be God's Messiah, the Christ, Lord, Son of an Son of God. And why? According to the New Testament sources, they were convinced - and only this conviction explains the emergence of Christianity at all - that Jesus had died, not into nothingness, but into God. That means that Jesus is living; living through, with and in God. What for? For us - as hope, as obligation, for our essential values.
I have come to believe, completely, that the crucial issue in the difference between egalitarian democracy and gangster governments, everything from corrupt democracy, such as America suffers from, through the kind of corrupt democracies that are ever more in danger of falling into downright gangster government - these days mostly fascist if not neo-Nazi is what people believe they are obligated to do for others when they really don't feel like doing things for them. Of a real, effective, durable and consequential belief in the universal and inalienable endowment of People and other living beings with rights and an equally effective sense that we all have a moral obligation to be respect those rights.
And that universal endowment can come from no other place than the one who endows us with such rights. No one has ever articulated that truth in other than terms of belief in such an Endower. There is no material structure that can be found by science, rights are not a physical attribute of the organism.
And that is, in every way, tied as tightly as possible to our view of human beings, as much as it also is our view of other animals. If you view people as soulless machines made of meat - the scientistic-materialist-atheist view of living beings - you have no moral obligation to them. You might feel something for some people or even living beings, but it cannot come out of that framing. The extent to which any individual or the individuals in a society depart from what is, otherwise, their materialistic view of living beings is the extent to which they will treat them well or badly. You can certainly see that in people who keep pets who they might treat as well, even better than they treat people unrelated to them, you can see it in people who keep animals for slaughter but who might select an individual from their flock or herd to keep as a pet. The same is true of such a view of people. I can't believe that the callousness with which they are prepared to treat animals or other people can have no effect on how they treat those they consider differently from the ones they mistreat and slaughter. That is certainly something which has been noted in many of those who are convicted of murdering a human being, they may well have had a history of killing, sometimes quite sadistically, animals.
That attitude is possible even if you see people as ensouled beings but to whom you owe no consequential regard, you will not mind them being oppressed, enslaved, exploited, used, murdered. That attitude has characterized the treatment of women in cultures around the world, it characterizes the widespread treatment of racial, ethnic, economic, and social minorities in most societies to one extent or another. That is an attitude that is enshrined in that "enlightenment" document, the United States Constitution, enabling that difference in treatment to those held in slavery and women and, to some extent, originally, even white men of no property. The very provisions doing that are the ones which have given us first a George W. Bush, now a Donald Trump, that make the Senate the most putridly corrupt part of government today.
I will blame the organized Christian churches for a good part of the suppression of the God of Jesus as proven in the New Testament, a God such as Hans Kung describes in this chapter. Someone who really, truly, fully believed in that God would find it impossible to both hold that view of God and the relationship of God to humanity and to enslave someone, oppress someone. Anyone who professes to believe in the God taught by Jesus and does those things doesn't discredit God as Jesus presented God, such a person merely discredits their own profession of faith. But the anti-Christian has little interest in that person's apostasy, their hypocritical profession of faith, their target is God and Jesus and Christianity. Attacking those, not the person who is two-faced or merely lying about their beliefs. Considering the number of opportunities to call out such hypocrites, pointing out their false profession of faith instead of using their hypocrisy to attack the faith they violate, it's remarkable how relatively seldom it's done. You'd be in your rights to believe this is not by accident.
No comments:
Post a Comment